Chapter 10
chapter
ten
Cora
He finds me against the fence at the far edge of the property, away from the lights. My face is tipped up, staring at the star-speckled sky. I wrap my arms around myself and concentrate on breathing.
The night is warm, but pleasant. Not sticky like it can get sometimes in the summer. The string lights behind me blur with the real ones overhead until it all looks like one continuous field of light, above and around, and I’m just standing in the middle of it.
I hear him coming before I see him.
Of course I do.
I’ve spent a week learning the particular weight of Oliver Blankenship’s footsteps—the rhythm of his boots on hardwood, on porch boards, on gravel. I know the sound of him the way you know the sound of weather approaching: by feel, by instinct, by the way the air changes when he’s near.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
He stops beside me. Leaves a foot of space. Leans against the post next to mine.
We stand there in the quiet. The party hums behind us. Distant music. Distant laughter.
“The slideshow was incredible,” he says.
I don’t look at him. If I look at him right now, with my defenses this low and his voice that soft, I will do something catastrophically stupid. Like tell him the truth. Or worse—lean into him and let myself be held. Oh, what I would give for an honest hug right now.
“It was just photos,” I say.
“It wasn’t just photos, and you know it.”
I’m quiet for a moment. “I found the box in the hall closet. I wasn’t snooping—I was looking for shelf paper. But once I opened it, I couldn’t—” I break off. Swallow around the tightness in my throat. “I couldn’t not do something with them. They deserve to be seen. Not just shoved in a closet.”
“Nobody asked you to do that.” His voice is quiet.
“I know.”
“So why did you?”
I finally look at him.
He’s leaning against the fence with his forearms resting on the top rail, the white button-down glowing faintly in the dark, those shifting hazel eyes watching me with an expression that undoes me.
Not suspicious. Not guarded. Just—open. The same way he looked at me across that bar, like he had all the time in the world and intended to spend it right here.
“Because no one’s ever taken pictures of me,” I say.
The words come out simpler than I expected.
Plainer. Like they’ve been sitting in my chest so long they’ve worn smooth.
“Not like that. Not with that kind of love behind the camera. And I thought—” My voice goes thin.
I clear my throat. “I thought if I couldn’t have that, maybe I could at least make sure someone else’s version of it didn’t get lost.”
The words settle between us like something set gently on a table.
He doesn’t speak.
I watch him not speak. I watch the silence move through him. The way his jaw shifts, the way his fingers curl around the fence rail, the way that line between his brows deepens just slightly.
“Cora.”
“Don’t,” I say quickly. Too quickly. “Don’t be nice to me right now. If you’re nice to me I’m going to cry again, and I’ve already done that once tonight, and I have a strict one-cry-per-social-event policy.”
“That’s a real policy?”
“It is now.”
That almost-smile. The one I’ve been chasing since Ace’s. It appears at the corner of his mouth and then retreats, like it knows better than to stay.
We stand there in the quiet. The fence is rough against my arms through the thin fabric of my dress. The air smells like mesquite smoke and brisket, and his cedar—scented soap that’s been living in my head rent-free for three months.
“You look beautiful tonight,” he says.
Low. Quiet. Not the fumbling nice from the table. This is the real version. The one he was holding back. I can hear it in the grain of his voice, in the way the words land—unhurried and certain, placed with the same deliberate care he gives to everything.
I turn my head. Study him. Those not-quite-brown eyes in the dark. The jaw. The stubble. The curls that fall across his forehead without a hat to hold them back. The broad, steady shape of him, leaning against a fence post in the starlight, looking at me like I’m something worth studying.
Something worth keeping.
“Oliver,” I say.
And my voice—traitor that it is cracks open just enough to let my emotions wobble into my words.
“Yeah?”
I open my mouth, but instead of my confession, he speaks.
“Dance with me,” he says.
Not a question. Not quite a demand. Something in between. An offering wrapped in certainty, like he’s decided this is going to happen and he’s giving me the courtesy of letting me think I have a choice.
“Oliver.”
“One dance.”
“We agreed. The ground rules—”
“It’s my grandparents’ anniversary party. People are dancing. If we don’t dance, it’s more conspicuous than if we do.”
I narrow my eyes. “Did you just use peer pressure to justify this?”
He shrugs. “Seemed like the kind of argument you’d respond to.”
He’s not wrong. And I hate that he knows it.
The band shifts into something slow. A steel guitar slides into a melody I recognize as the notes drift across the yard like smoke, curling around the string lights, settling into the warm night air.
I should say no.
I should absolutely say no.
I should turn around and go find someone—anyone else—to talk to. So that I can spend the rest of this night at a safe distance from the man whose child is currently growing inside me.
“One dance.”
His mouth does the thing. The almost-smile. The one he keeps locked away and only lets out in fractions, like he’s rationing it, like if he gave me the full version I’d have too much power.
He closes the distance between us in three strides.
His hand finds the small of my back first. Warm. Certain. Exactly where it was three months ago, when a slow song played and everything that came after became inevitable.
His other hand takes mine. Our fingers thread together like they remember the shape of each other.
And then we’re moving.
It’s nothing like the dance floor at Ace’s. There’s no crowd pressing in, no excuse to stand close. Out here, near the edge of the party, we’re just two people swaying under the stars. The music reaches us in waves—clear, then muffled, then clear again as the breeze shifts.
“Relax,” he murmurs.
“I am relaxed.”
“Your shoulder is touching your ear.”
I consciously drop my shoulders. It doesn’t help much.
Because his hand is on my back and I can feel every single one of his fingers through the fabric of my dress, and the heat of his palm is radiating into my spine, and my body remembers this.
My body remembers him. The specific pressure of his hand, the way he leads without pushing, the way his thumb brushes—barely, almost accidentally—against the curve of my waist.
My body remembers, and it is staging a mutiny against every ground rule I established.
“You’re tense again,” he says.
“I’m always tense. It’s a personality trait.”
That breath of a laugh. The one that got out before he could weigh it. I feel it against my hair.
“You made both of my parents cry.”
“Everyone cried.”
“My dad cried. And he hasn’t cried since Kelsie’s wedding, and even then, he blamed allergies.”
“Texas does have a lot of allergens.”
“Cora.” His voice drops half a register. “I’m trying to tell you that what you did meant something. To my family. To my grandparents. Stop deflecting.”
I press my lips together.
The thing about deflecting is that it’s a reflex.
You learn it young in foster care—how to make a joke before someone can make you feel something, how to redirect attention before it lands somewhere tender.
It’s armor. It’s survival. And it works beautifully right up until someone sees through it and calls you on it with quiet, infuriating patience.
“It meant something to me,” he adds.
“Okay,” I say softly. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Then he nods. “Can I ask you something?”
My pulse picks up. “Depends on the question.”
“The photo of my dad. The hospital one. How did you know to include it?”
“It was in the box.”
“But you put it at the center of the slideshow. Right in the middle. Everything builds to that photo and then expands outward from it. That wasn’t accidental.”
I swallow. He noticed that. Of course, he noticed that. This man misses nothing.
“Because that’s what it was,” I say carefully. “The center. Everything they built—the marriage, the family, all of it—that moment was the turning point. When it stopped being just the two of them and became something bigger.” I pause. “Something that lasted.”
His hand tightens at my back. Just barely. Just enough.
“You see things,” he says.
“I observe,” I say, echoing his own word back to him from that night at Ace’s.
He’s quiet for a beat. “I remember.”
The air between us thickens. Not with tension — with something denser.
Recognition. The slow, dangerous awareness that this isn’t a dance between strangers, or even housemates, or even a one-night stand’s awkward encore.
This is something else. This is two people who fit together in a way that defies the clean, contained boxes I’ve tried to put them in.
The song starts to fade. Another one picks up beneath it. This one is even slower.
“Another?” he asks.
I should say no. “One more,” I hear myself say.
He adjusts. Pulls me fractionally closer. I let him, because apparently my self-preservation instincts took the night off. I let myself lay my head on his chest and feel a moment of pure contentment.
He turns us, smooth and practiced. The string lights blur at the edges of my vision like streaks of warm gold.
And then they don’t stop blurring. The lights smear. The music goes tinny and distant, like someone shoved cotton in my ears. The warm night air, which had felt pleasant five seconds ago, suddenly feels like a wet wool blanket pressing against my face.
I blink. Hard.
The ground tilts.
Not dramatically. Not a movie swoon. Just a slow, nauseating shift, like the world is on a turntable and someone bumped it. My fingers tighten on Oliver’s shoulder without my permission.
“Cora?” His voice reaches me from a distance. Muffled. Wrong.
“I’m fine,” I say automatically. The words sound like they’re coming from inside a jar. “I just need—”
The second wave hits harder. A rush of heat floods up from my chest to my scalp, and my vision goes white at the edges, and the last coherent thought I have is not here, not now, not in front of all these people before my knees decide they’re done participating in this evening.
I don’t fall.
I don’t fall because Oliver catches me.